Artist Justin Parr touches his sculpture, "Tesseract, next to Tesseract Study #8, right, and Time Travel Device #3, on wall, left, in his exhibit "tesseract" at Unit B Gallery in San Antonio on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2012.

Artist Justin Parr touches his sculpture, "Tesseract, next to Tesseract Study #8, right, and Time Travel Device #3, on wall, left, in his exhibit "tesseract" at Unit B Gallery in San Antonio on Wednesday, Sept.

Suspended from the ceiling, "Tesseract," a glass sculpture by artist Justin Parr, looks like the frozen tracks of a ricocheting beam of light or the work of a geometrically inclined spider.

At the opening of Parr's exhibit at Unit B (Gallery), however, some folks weren't altogether happy to find it there. The title piece of the show is meant to be displayed on a pedestal with under-lighting to set it aglow with color.

Still, it makes sense aloft, particularly given Parr's companion at the time he was working on the piece.

"It looks like a black widow's web, and right when I started I caught a black widow out at Hot Wells," says Parr, 31, who is caretaker of the ruins of the old Hot Wells Motel and runs Flight Gallery with fellow artist Ed Saavedra. "It lived in a jar next to me while I was working on this thing for a little while."

"Tesseract" merges Parr's dual artistic paths: photography and glass blowing. Along with sculpture, the exhibit includes macro images of the worlds that seem to be frozen within glass objects - palm-size disks and smooth eggs suffused with color - made by Parr.

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Math buffs might be familiar with the term "tesseract," which refers to the four-dimensional analog of a cube. Or more likely, you, like Parr, read Madeleine L'Engle's kids' science-fiction classic "A Wrinkle in Time," in which a tesseract is a wormhole in space. Neither really inspired the artist to create the title piece, a work-in-progress he is planning to expand to three times its current size.

"I've just been tagging it on Instagram as 'Tesseract' as I've been working on it, so it just kind of evolved into that," he says.

The artist, who studied photography at UTSA, says he "dabbled" in glass years ago but got serious about working in the medium when his friend Jake Harper opened Zollie Glass Studio in Southtown. He borrowed a torch and set up a second work station in the space about four years ago.

"As a medium, it's kind of mysterious," Parr says. "It's like trying to make something out of (material) that you can't touch."

Working with glass also appeals to Parr's inner firebug.

"It's like, 'Oh, my gosh! I can play with fire and melt things all day and try to make it controlled?' " he says. "It's really fun in that way."

As Parr was working with glass, he noticed alien landscapes and galaxies of swirling color imbedded within.

"I was staring at them as I was making them every day, just wanting to get closer and closer," he says. "I started doing research on macro photography, and I found this lens that's like a microscope."

The manual lens is difficult to work with, he says, "so two hours can be totally fruitless, or it can be wonderful."

People are often surprised to find out the images aren't digital.

"The beauty to me is that it's frozen down there, and it's all done with a magnifying glass," Parr says.